Promises to Keep
by mosylu
Summary: Their daughter is turning eight tomorrow. Jyn remembers how her own eighth year went, and fears for the future. Cassian tries to reassure her, but he knows she's not wrong to worry. Written for Rebelcaptain Appreciation Week, Day One: "family"


Cassian found his wife sitting on a boulder at the edge of the rocky beach, staring out at the water, her boots braced against another boulder.

Without saying anything, he sat down next to her. The stone was damp and cold, like the wind that tossed the untidy hair out of her eyes. He settled in, anyway. He'd waited out in worse, and for worse reasons.

After several minutes, Jyn said, "Is she in bed?"

"Mmm."

"Was she upset I didn't read with her?"

"I told her you had to go out and check one of the perimeter alarms in the south field."

She gave him a sidelong look.

He admitted, "A little."

She sighed. "I'll go and kiss her goodnight when I get back."

"She was already falling asleep."

"Still," she said.

He put his hand on her back and rubbed circles down her spine. "What is it?" She'd been tense all day - no, days. _Weeks._ Winding herself tighter and tighter.

He'd been waiting for her to come to him with it, but all this time, the only indication had been the way she burrowed into his side at night, the lines of her body humming with tension even in her sleep. So when she'd disappeared before Batira's bedtime, he'd decided enough was enough.

She stared out to sea, squinting as a particularly fierce gust of wind sprayed their faces with a fine mist of salt water. After twenty years, he knew her silences. This wasn't a stonewalling silence, but a seeking one. Somewhere out there in the waves and the clouds and the froth on the water were the words to explain what was hurting her.

"She's eight tomorrow."

"Yes."

He'd taken Batira into town this morning, a journey of about an hour in their rickety landspeeder, so she could help him buy the ingredients for her birthday dinner tomorrow. Looking out to sea, Cassian could tell that the weather report had been right - there was a storm moving in, and tomorrow nobody would be going anywhere. The meal would more than likely be cooked over the fire stove and lit by candlelight, because in bad weather, the generator fueled the farm and not the house.

"When I was eight," Jyn said, "I wore my hair in two skinny braids. I lived on a farm not too far from the shore and I ran through every field at least once a day. My favorite doll was a stormtrooper."

He rubbed his thumb over the bump at the top of her spine. "What was its name?"

"Stormy." She managed a smile. "Imaginative, wasn't I?"

Batira did not wear her hair in two skinny braids. She had always hated having her hair combed, so much that by the time she turned five, they'd given in and cropped it short. It slicked to her head like a cap when it rained, and puffed out like ruffled feathers when she rubbed her head in frustration.

She lived on a farm not too far from the shore. She rarely ran, unless she had a reason. She was more likely to curl herself into a comforting hollow somewhere and watch the motions of grass and birds and the waves, a solemn spy on the ways of nature.

She had no favorite doll, but she built things constantly. They found her gadgets everywhere. In the past year or so, they'd even started to be useful.

"When I was eight," Jyn said, "my mother died."

Cassian let out his breath. Ah. Here it was. "Do you plan to die? I would like to know that kind of thing in advance, if possible."

"Don't be an idiot," she said.

He kissed her temple and said quietly, against her skin, "Are you afraid for her or for you?"

Silence. Then, tremulous: "I don't know."

He understood. He'd had cause to consider his own death once or twice since coming here (which was still a better record than any week in Alliance Intelligence), and beyond the horror of nonexistence, there was the fear of leaving them behind, of smashing a hole in their lives that he had reason to know could never fully heal.

She looked down at her fingers. "I've been telling myself for weeks - this isn't the same. Things are different now."

"We made them different," he reminded both of them.

The blood they'd spilled, their own and that of others. The fight they had fought to exhaustion, and then gotten up and continued to fight. The endless days, the bitter nights. This peace was theirs by right, and curled up in her little bed, watched over by a cantankerous droid, was the reason why.

"She will be eight for a year," he said. "Then she will be nine, and ten, and eleven - and you'll be here."

Jyn turned her head so their noses brushed. "You can't make that promise," she said.

"The Empire is gone," he said. "Ten years. Fifteen if you count from the day the Emperor died."

"Leia's worried about the Outer Rim," Jyn said. "And did you hear what Baze said, last visit, about the numbers of missing children in the system he and Chirrut had come from? And Bodhi thinks the Senate is getting soft and complacent, and that's _Bodhi_ saying that."

He was silent.

"Don't tell me you don't see the currents," she insisted.

"All right, then," he said. "I won't tell you that. But the Empire is still gone. And we are here, not Lah'mu, and nobody is hunting either one of us. This is our home, not our hiding place. And we are not at war."

"Yet," she said, low.

"Yet," he said.

Cassian wished he could tell himself and his wife that the undercurrents in the peace they'd won were just grumblings, stirrings, the last death throes of the Empire's corpse. But he knew better.

"Is there anything I can say that will make you stop thinking of your mother's death throughout this whole year?"

"No," she said.

Which was about what he'd expected. Because there was nothing she could ever say that would make the loss of his parents all right. They had settled that a very, very long time ago.

She scooted closer to him and put her arms around his waist. The terrible tension in her body had eased. He wrapped his around her shoulders and rubbed his cheek against her damp hair, contemplating how like Jyn it was, to be reassured by having her fears confirmed.

They held each other tight for a long time.

Another howl of wind brought water spraying in, and she shuddered. "Much longer out here and I'll be soaked through," she said, and reached up to curl her fingers in the ends of his hair. Freezing drops rolled down his spine. "And you will too."

"This particular thinking spot wasn't my idea," he told her.

She wrinkled her nose at him and kissed him on the mouth. "I love you," she said.

They didn't say it often, in words. He kissed her back. "I love you," he said. "And if you die, I will be here for her. And if I die, K-2 will take charge."

"Oh, Force, we'd really better survive," she said in horror. "Her social skills are bad enough as it is."

He laughed, and she kissed him again. Her lips were cold against his, and he contemplated how quietly they could take a scalding hot shower together back at the house. "Let's go inside," she murmured.

"Seconded." He grunted as he got to his feet. All those silent vigils in worse weather had been in a much younger body. She held out her hand and steadied him as he climbed down off the boulder, and he did the same for her.

Once they were both on level ground, she hooked her fingers in his belt loops and pulled him to her, resting her forehead on his chest. He put his arms around her shoulders and kissed her ear.

"You know," she said into his battered old jacket. "Baze and Chirrut would probably be on-planet before our bodies got cold. And if not them, Bodhi."

"And not a revolutionary fanatic among them," he said. "Not any worse than we are, anyway."

Instead of laughing, she looked up at him. "Tell me our daughter will never be a child with a gun," she said. "Lie if you have to."

He put his hand on her cheek. "If and when she joins a fight, it will be her choice, and she will be old enough to make it. That's the truth."

She nodded and looked out to sea. He did too.

"Looks bad out there," she said, and he grunted in assent. Yes, there was a storm moving in. And it would be a bad one. But it was a long way away yet.

"Come back home," he murmured. "You have to kiss your daughter goodnight."

FINIS


End file.
